USAF Cyberspace Command: To Fly and Fight in Cyberspace

摘要

We are a nation at war. Our military is engaged in a fight against groups and individuals who follow an ideology that has as its fundamental tenets a hostility toward our people, our beliefs, and our values. Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and representatives from across our government who are engaged in this bitter fight will emerge with perspectives shaped by their experiences in combat against extremists who use terror as their primary weapon to achieve their objectives. And we are also at war in cyberspace -- a relatively new domain that, like air and space, crosses military, civilian, economic, and especially information aspects of our national interests. We have already witnessed and experienced hostile incursions in cyberspace. Nothing demonstrates the contested nature of cyberspace more than how its capabilities were used to support physical attacks on our governmental and financial infrastructures on 9/11. Encrypted communications and cellular phones were used for the first attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in 1993. Aided by computer-based flight simulators, hijackers trained, planned, and funded a more successful attack. The attacks against the World Trade Center in New York had, as a secondary objective, the catastrophic degradation of the financial information upon which a large segment of the United States' economy depends.